EL’s St Bernard’s turns 25
Hospice still cares for thousands
ROWS of neatly shelved second-hand books line the walls in a room which was once a palliative care ward of the St Bernard’s Hospice in Southernwood.
Curtain rails which separated beds from each other are still suspended from the ceiling, a plug point for an oxygen unit still peeps out from between donated books and a basin for nurses is still attached to the wall.
The in-house patient care unit may have stopped operating in November 2013 and the wards put to use as an income-generating charity shop, but caring for the city’s terminally ill has not stopped for a second.
In fact, St Bernard’s today celebrates 25 years of caring for patients and supporting families through their sickness and loss.
And, although it no longer offers 24-hour in-house care, the hospice started by Dr Betty Bennett in 1991 continues to provide home-based care to those in the deepest stages of debilitating illness.
For an HIV-positive Buffalo Flats resident, the hospice has literally been a life-saver.
“I was dying in 2009. My blood count was down to three or four. Doctors gave up on me, but St Bernard’s took me in. They still visit me every month,” she said.
CEO René Wienekus, who first joined the NPO as a nurse manager 13 years ago, said it had been an “emotionally draining” decision to stop admitting patients to the eightbed facility almost three years ago.
“It was costing us R3-million a year to offer 24-hour nursing care and nobody funded that facility,” she said.
“We had to do our own fundraising and it was financially draining. “We just could not afford it.” But there was funding for homebased care, particularly for HIV/Aids patients, and so the hospice stepped up this side of its operation.
“In the mid-1990s when HIV/Aids exploded, nobody wanted to look after the patients. That’s when the Hospice Palliative Care Association of SA decided we would look after them.
“Back then it was a death sentence and so that is how we started going to people’s homes all over the East London urban area. We also realised many people wanted to die at home and we expanded our cancer homecare too.
“Of the 300 patients we had last year, 132 had cancer.”
Since the in-patient unit closed, home-based care has increased until there are now 26 mobile carers and four nurses visiting sick people at home every day.
But funding exists only for HIV/ Aids home-based patients – the health department, for example, provides R1-million a year for this.
“All the fundraising we do is for cancer, motor neuron and multiple sclerosis home-based care and so we have annual events like the cycle from PE to East London, and the charity ball. There are also 24 schools collecting coins in bottles for us.”
The charity shop is also a big money spinner for the hospice, which needs R5-million a year to stay afloat.
“We are so excited about our 25th birthday and want to thank all our donors,” Wienekus said.
Thousands of people have been supported and cared for by St Bernard’s. —